


these, our bodies, possessed by light

by Verbyna



Series: all just trying to be holy [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Anti-Hero, Daddy Issues, Dysfunctional Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-08
Updated: 2012-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-07 08:03:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/428767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your physicists say we turned out every way we could. Parallel worlds, they call them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these, our bodies, possessed by light

**Author's Note:**

> The stories in this series can be read separately and out of order. 
> 
> Beta'd by dear_monday, who is an excellent person to have in one's corner. Beta'd the second time around by theviolonist, who probably had better things to do and definitely didn't sign up for it. Thanks, guys!

 This is not a deal they’ve made. Tony knows better than to make deals with the god of lies, and Loki can see how a deal would end even as he says the words.

This is not a deal. This is room to breathe, even if all the scents are sweat, metal and ice. It’s Tony remembering icebergs falling into seawater, deep blue like Loki isn’t (but should be, whispers the voice in the back of Tony’s mind, the voice he’s always ignored but never learned to shut up). It’s Loki, remembering what it was like to slam Tony through a window as he slams into him.

Tony’s fingernails are bitten to the quick when he’s been working too hard. Loki says, “You should sleep.” Because he likes the drag of those nails down his back, and he likes Tony better when he’s not thinking about circuitry with his mouth around Loki’s cock.

“Idle hands do the devil’s work,” Tony says, smiling like he’s not tired at all. His hands don’t lie. His mouth’s still trying.

*

This is the scene: Tony on one side of the room, Loki on the other. In the middle are the things they don’t say. In the middle is a space that JARVIS fills with warnings, but even an AI knows a lost cause when he processes one.

Loki takes a step forward, because he fell through the unnamed space between the stars and this is no different. It should be, maybe. It’s just a room. But it’s a room with Tony in it, and that makes all the difference.

Tony takes a step back, but he can’t go through walls. If he could, Loki would follow.

The light from outside paints the scene romantic, but it’s not. This is Tony, hitting the wall. This is Loki, still walking.

Their eyes are wide open.

*

“I wonder what you’d sound like if I stopped your heart,” Loki pants in Tony’s ear, and Tony’s heart, the traitor, skips a beat. Loki buries a smile in Tony’s skin, where it could be a blessing if Tony wanted it to be. “I wonder what your last words would be. Would they be 'harder,' or my name? Would you ask for more?”

“They’d be fuck you, you twisted asshole, don’t stop.”

Loki bursts into laughter. Tony likes to make him laugh like this, even if Loki’s open mouth reminds him of a snake poised to strike. There’s no one else to make Loki laugh.

“I appreciate the sentiment, Stark.” Push. “If not the delivery.”

Tony thinks, _why does it matter?_ One of these days Loki will lose a battle and crush Tony’s throat to spite the universe. Breaking a toy is like that. It’s an I-don’t-care, and it’s for things that _do_ matter. Just—less than other things.

“Say it again,” Loki purrs. And Tony says, “Don’t stop.”

Loki doesn’t stop until Tony is screaming it.

*

Tony drinks less these days. It would all be easier to handle with booze, the secret and the secrecy, the way he doesn’t leave loopholes in his designs for Loki but still fucks him like he doesn’t know where that body’s been.

When he’s been awake long enough to give in to self-reflection, Tony pictures his life splitting at every big decision he’s made. Somewhere there’s a Tony Stark who let Obie take the company, and he has no shrapnel in his chest. Somewhere there’s a Tony who died when he was kidnapped, and one who was killed in a cave; one who survived Obie and destroyed the Iron Man suit and went back to making weapons instead of making himself into a weapon. And somewhere there’s a Tony who sounded the alarm when Loki came to his bedroom when he was supposed to be imprisoned in a galaxy far, far away.

That’s where he stops, because Loki displays his impeccable timing and distracts him.

Tony’s sober, so he notices how beaten up Loki is sometimes. He’s sober, so he doesn’t bring it up.

*

They don’t miss being bored. That’s why it starts and how it carries on, despite everything.

Loki opens his mouth to say something disparaging about Thor, but in the end he doesn’t say anything at all. Tony closes his eyes tightly and makes a wish. He opens them, and Loki’s looking at him strangely.

“I can’t give you that,” he says.

“Did I ask you to?”

*

No one ever told them that they couldn’t be loved. If anything, they were loved at the wrong time. And the wrong way.

“When I was a kid, I used to think my dad could do anything,” says Tony in a fit of madness. JARVIS sends a pulsing light through the room, the signal that he’s giving too much away. “He could take something that worked and make it work beautifully. He could make anything better.”

It looks like a light show. Loki lifts his hand, makes it translucent. “I always knew my father’s weaknesses.”

“Liar.”

The lights stop abruptly, replaced with the exact shade of an arctic sunset. “Your father made weapons, Stark. Don't defend those who are beyond it.”

Tony sits up and looks down at Loki, spread out like a wet dream or a nightmare. He can see Loki’s bones through the skin. But Tony has a hole in his chest, so who’s he to turn away?

“Do you ever think that we could’ve turned out differently?”

Loki seems to give this some thought. “Your physicists say we turned out every way we could. Parallel worlds, they call them.” He looks at Tony’s expression, and gives that some thought, too.

“No. No, I don’t.”

*

Here is a scene that never happens in Tony Stark’s life, such as it is.

He is facing Loki in the middle of a battlefield. And Loki stops fighting.

And Loki stops his heart, because he knows the way the nerves reach it, he knows the map.

And Loki sees something in his face, the only promise Tony made him, the vengeance he’s always prepared to wreak; and he leaves, never to return to Earth.

And Loki slithers into his head like a snake, because he knows the way, and he gives Tony a reason to stop.

He dreams them all. Loki, in the corner of the room, smiles bitterly at his own foolishness.

*

Loki leaves. Loki comes back, and Tony’s ready for him, in every way he can be.


End file.
